Reflections
Exhibit of Frida Kahlo photos explores a tormented talent
Frida Kahlo’s paintings mixed torment with a magical realism rooted in her subconsciousness. Somewhere between her own myth-making and her self-portraits lies an ever-shifting identity. Slipping from a Native queen to a wounded deer, she was both nursing infant and bedridden bride.
She was also the most photographed woman of her era.
Opening on Saturday, May 6, at Santa Fe’s Museum of Spanish Colonial Art, “Mirror, Mirror … Photographs of Frida Kahlo” traces the artist’s life through 56 images by some of the finest photographers of her lifetime, including Carl Van Vechten, Lola and Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Imogen Cunningham and Nickolas Muray.
Kahlo learned the power of photography as a teenager assisting her father, a well-known photographer, in the darkroom. She posed, manipulated and used the camera to record her passion for her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera,, her agonizing physical decline, her love of animals and Native culture.
“She created herself as an expression of Mexican nationality,” said the museum’s guest curator, Penelope HunterStiebel.
In Carl Van Vechten’s 1933 portrait, the artist wears a gourd on her head, her ears dangling silver hoops, her neck circled in chunky jade necklaces. Van Vechnten took the photograph when Rivera was painting his famous mural at Rockefeller Center — one that was destroyed
because it contained a portrait of Vladimir Lenin.
The gourd reflects a tradition of indigenous Mexican women, who used them as a means of transport, Hunter-Stiebel said.
“This was completely new in the U.S., and she got a lot of attention,” she continued. “She wrote to her mother, ‘The papers just love it when I appear on the street.’ She emerged from his shadow to the point when (photographers) were assigned to photograph him, they photographed her.”
‘Heroine of pain’
The look was practical, as well. The long, full skirts concealed a leg deformed from childhood polio. When she was 18, a wooden bus she was riding in collided with a streetcar. An iron handrail impaled her pelvis, fracturing the bone. She never fully recovered, enduring 30 operations throughout her life.
“In Mexico, she is called the heroine of pain,” Hunter-Stiebel said.
Painting became a way to
explore her identity. When she was bedridden, her caretakers installed a mirror above her easel so that she could paint herself, a process she continued as her body disintegrated.
Kahlo and Rivera married in 1932. Her parents described the union as a “marriage between an elephant and a dove.”
Devastated by Rivera’s infidelities, including an affair with her own sister, Kahlo eventually embarked on her own. The couple divorced in 1939. They remarried in 1940 with the stipulation that they would retain independent lives.
The photographer Nickolas Muray portrayed her in a carefully choreographed color portrait in 1939.
“Of all of her lovers, he was the longest-lasting,” Hunter-Stiebel said. “They had a passionate physical affair that lasted 10 years.
Kahlo adorned herself in the traditional dress of women living on the Isthmus of Mexico, otherwise known as the Tehuana style.
“Her mother was half Tehuana,” Hunter-Stiebel said.
A machine-embroidered blouse, floral headpiece and long skirt defined Tehuana dress.
Closer look
Muray also shot her outdoors petting a fawn during the divorce, one of the many animals in her menagerie.
“She’s giving a lot of her devotion and affection to animals,” Hunter-Stiebel said. “She identified with deer; the defenseless, helpless animal. She has monkeys, she has these strange, ancient dogs. She has parrots; she has doves. She tried to deflect the attention she had lavished on Diego.”
Muray also captured her painting one of her most famous canvases: “The Two Fridas.” An artery links the pre-Diego Victorian Frida with her Tehuanadraped self. The double portrait expresses the desperation and loneliness she felt at their separation.
Kahlo died in 1954. To this day, her death remains a mystery. Her biographer Hayden Herrera maintains it may have been a suicide. No autopsy was performed.
“So little is confirmable because she and Diego were the biggest liars in the world,” Hunter-Stiebel said. “She changed her birthday to coincide with the start of the Mexican Revolution. She also said her father was Jewish because she wanted to be identified with the oppressed. His lineage has been traced to a line of Mormons. They were great storytellers.
“After her death, the whole feminist movement adopted her.”